This book examines the language of historical business discourse in English by applying an innovative combination of two methodological approaches: a corpus-based study of a collection of nineteenth-century business letters, complemented by a qualitative, context-sensitive interpretation of the results. It is the first study to trace the evolution of the sub-genre of the specialised business epistolary guide in English and to investigate a set of distinctive linguistic features in specialised historical business discourse in English by identifying and quantifying typical phraseological patterns.
